


The Weight of Dreams

by notoneforreality



Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [12]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007 Fest, 007 Fest 2020, Autistic Character, Executive Dysfunction, Insomnia, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Prompt Fill, Q Has a Crush, Q is Autistic, Sleeping Together, Too Many Beds, autistic traits, reverse trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24999181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality
Summary: Q was never any good at getting to sleep before he bought a weighted blanket. When out in the wild for MI6, however, he doesn't have access to it, which means he's in for a long night.Bond has a suggestion for how he can help.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Series: QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795726
Comments: 20
Kudos: 158





	The Weight of Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Written for--  
> 12th July: Reverse Tropes Day;  
> Trope prompt table: Reverse a common trope;  
> This prompt from the 2020 anon list: Q always has and would always be bad at falling asleep unless he overworks himself – his desk an uncomfortable pillow. More jokingly than not he got himself an extra heavy weighted blanket, sleeping at least somewhat well for the first time in years.  
> Unknowingly he has gotten quite attached to it.  
> When Q then has to accompany Bond on a mission he thinks not much of it but when they sleep in a shared room (if they have separate beds or share one is writer’s choice) he is restless without the extra weight.  
> Bond threatens to lay atop of Q if he wouldn’t cease to roll around keeping him up.  
> Q doesn’t know how to answer that.

Q is going to vibrate out of his skin. There are forty beds in the room that he has to choose from, which is already a horrific number of options, but there are literally no differences between each of them on which he can base his decision.

“Why on earth are there so many beds?”

Bond looks over, one eyebrow raised. “It’s a camp dormitory,” he says, like that’s an acceptable answer.

“When I was on scout camp the biggest room we had was ten beds, not forty.” Q crosses his arms, squeezing his bicep with one hand and pulling at the flesh around his lower ribs with the other. Choices are hard enough when there are differences he can assess for pros and cons, let alone when it’s just the same blank bed with a wooden frame and white sheets stretching across the room, like someone had been too enthusiastic with the copy and paste.

There are four rows of ten: two each along the walls, and then two rows in the middle of the room with the headboards pushed together, leaving two aisles down the room.

Unbothered, Bond shrugs and swings his bags onto the bed closest to the door. Q narrows his eyes at his, and then strides off to the far corner, dropping his things on the bed furthest away. A corner, as far away from the door and Bond as possible, is the most reasons he’s going to come up with for choosing one bed over any others. As it is, he dithers for a moment before actually setting down his bags on the white cotton sheets folded with military precision.

“Do I smell?” Bond calls, and Q fusses, grabbing his laptop bag and a few other bits before returning to Bond.

“Of Calvin Klein cologne,” he says, when he doesn’t need to shout across the distance between then, and Bond cocks his head.

“Does it bother you?”

“No. It’s nice.” Q clears his throat and indicates the door. “We should get going.”

They’re here for a tech conference, for some reason being held on the grounds of an old Scouts camp, and Q is determined to get to as many talks as possible, as soon as possible. Bond, here as protection, inclines his head and gestures to the door, letting Q take the lead.

The day goes well. Q makes at least seven new networking connections, obtains a card for a security testing company that are willing to run real life sims on his firewall program, and facilitates the verbal dissection of an old, sexist man who’d tried to tell a woman from MI5’s InfoSec division that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Then they go back to the absurdly large room they’ve been allocated and Bond stops just inside the door to get his bed ready. Q continues to the far corner and changes into his pyjamas, a cotton t-shirt and flannel trousers, then gets into bed and tries very hard to sleep.

He spends hours tossing and turning. He’s never been good at sleeping, especially in silence. When he was younger, he could only sleep if the radio in the corner of his room was playing with the volume turned to the perfect volume — not so quiet that Q was spending more energy trying to hear it properly, not so loud that he couldn’t eventually tune it out and drift to sleep — but that had stopped working around his GCSEs. After that, for a long while, he just overworked himself until his body couldn’t take it anymore and shut down.

He’d become the campus cryptid that way, at university. He slept anywhere and everywhere, at any time, so long as he didn’t have a lecture. One of the oddest places he’d woken up in was a hollow of a tree down by the lake, curled up with leaves and twigs stuck in his hair. The next day, he found out that his friend Sage had spotted him and taken a photo on their fancy film camera. 

“You need the sleep,” they said, when he asked why they hadn’t woken him up. “And you weren’t in any danger.”

Something similar had happened at MI6, although it was less of him becoming a cryptid, and more of everyone else becoming very quickly used to seeing a lanky boffin either sprawled, fast asleep on a desk, or tucked into improbably small spaces and completely unconscious. 

When he was made Quartermaster, Ameera had cornered him with a webpage of weighted blankets and the benefits of using them, and she’d bugged him about it until he bought one.

For the first time since probably year ten, Q had gone home in the evening, climbed into bed with the weighted blanket, and was asleep in less than five minutes.

He bought Ameera a new mouse as a thank you present, and had used the weighted blanket every night since. Now it was only after his worst nights, or during the longest spells hunkered down in Q-Branch that left him passed out in Vauxhall Cross.

Today, he’s been awake since four in the morning, and yet at two o’clock the next morning, he’s still staring, eyes nowhere near closing, as he tries to find a comfortable position in which he can get some sleep.

He twists onto his back and huffs, staring up at the whitewashed boards of the ceiling. 

Maybe the bed is the issue.

Q glances across to the other end of the room, where the bunched shadow of Bond is lying still on his own bed, and then slips out from under the covers and darts over to the next bad along. The springs and bedframes squeak and groan, but Bond doesn’t move. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Q leans across to grab the woollen blanket he’d requisitioned from a cupboard out in the hallway and tugs it back over himself. It’s not much, but it’s a little extra weight and warmth.

It takes ten minutes for him to decide that this bed isn’t going to help him sleep any more than the original had. He sits up and looks over at Bond, again. The shape has shifted, more sprawled out than before, but there’s no sign of movement, nothing to suggest that Bond has woken.

Q gets out of the covers, grabs the blanket from the bed and his phone from the nightstand, and marches to roughly the middle of the room, trying a bed from the next row over, too. The Deputy Head of his sixth form had told him that sometimes change was good when sleep wasn’t coming easily. Perhaps the second bed had been too close to the first.

He drags a hand over his face, rolling his eyes at his own thought process, but he quietly gets into the new bed, shoving his phone under the pillow. It’s not a particularly good idea to sleep with it right under his head, but putting it down on the wooden nightstand would risk the noise of it waking Bond.

Half an hour later, Q concludes that the new bed isn’t going to help, either. The missing weight of his blanket is somehow a physical thing and a void at the same time, leaving Q feeling simultaneously like he’s floating, can’t settle down into sleep. The voice in the back of Q’s head says something about security and safety, and perhaps he would feel better if he weren’t half a room away from the trained Secret Service agent who’s supposed to be here to protect him anyway. Q tries to quash it with as much mental force as possible. 

It resists his efforts, and he huffs.

_ Only to the next row over _ , he thinks,  _ and only a couple of beds further down. _

He moves again, finding a bed one row across and three beds up from Bond, the closest he dares get. Any closer would risk waking Bond.

“Go to sleep,” Bond says, his voice husky and low. 

Q rolls over onto his side to squint at Bond through the darkness. He’s still facing the door, facing away from Q, and still in the same position he’d been in an hour ago. Q can’t tell whether he’s been awake and waiting that long, or whether he’s just woken up and hasn’t moved yet.

“Sorry,” Q whispers. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He rolls over again and Bond groans. “If you don’t stay still, I’m going to come over there and lie on top of you so you can’t move.”

Q goes very still, his whole body heating. The worst part of it is that he would quite like that. Bond is obviously much heavier than Q’s blanket, but right now he’ll take anything to avoid the sensation of dissociating that he’s in danger of fallen into more so than sleep. 

Or rather, the worst part of it is the outrageous crush he’s had on Bond for the past two years, since the first time he saw him stalk into Q-Branch and bicker with Major Boothroyd, then saunter out with a smirk and a confident assurance in his step. It’s part of the reason he’d chosen a bed so far away from Bond in the first place, to avoid the odd intimacy of sleeping too close. If Bond shares a bed with him, he may explode.

Q shifts so he’s flat out on the bed with his face buried in the pillow — unconducive to sleep without suffocation, but no more or less likely to keep him awake than any other position he’s tried — and tries not to scream into the pillowcase.

“Q,” Bond says, warning.

It’s not like Q’s trying to be annoying, but he is annoyed at himself. He’s tired, can feel it pulling under his eyes, but his body is still uncooperative, refusing to relax. His mind is racing, too, and he groans into the pillow, irritated.

Two seconds later, a creak makes him turn his head towards Bond’s bed.

Bond isn’t in it. He’s up and creeping striding towards Q. A line of moonlight slants through a gap between the blinds and the windowsill, throwing light on Bond as he moves. He’s shirtless, with just a pair of tracksuit bottoms slung low on his hips, and Q might just die right here, right now.

Then Bond climbs onto the bed and lies down on top of Q’s back.

Q can’t breathe.

Bond must be able to feel it, because he makes a concerned noise. “Are you okay? Is this okay? Can you breathe?”

It’s the most uncertain Q has ever heard Bond, but he doesn’t know how to answer, doesn’t know how to explain that his sudden lack of air isn’t to do with the weight of Bond on top of him, but rather the fact that Bond’s bare chest is pressed against his back. Bond moves his arm, so that his hand is resting on Q’s shoulder, just above where his head is laying in between Q’s shoulder blades, and Q thinks this might count as a cruel and unusual torture. Ameera can never find out about this; she’ll never let it go.

“There are forty beds in this room, Bond,” he says.

Bond hums. “None as comfortable as this one, though.”

“Really?” Q tries to make his voice disbelieving, but it’s already so much effort to even form the words. He tries again, but the words slur together. “S’ many ‘ther beds.”

When Q’s phone alarm goes off under his head, he startles awake, momentarily unsure of where he is. Only when he tries to sit up, does he realise. The weight on top of him doesn’t slide off like it usually does, bunching into a heap of fabric and pellets at his hips, because it’s Bond slumped across Q’s body. They’ve moved, during the night, so Q is lying on his back, with Bond’s cheek pressed against his sternum. One of Q’s hands is draped over Bond’s back, the other dangling off the bed, and Bond’s hands are two warm and electric points of contact through his thin pyjama top, one on Q’s shoulder, and the other on his hip.

“God, would you turn that bloody thing off,” Bond mutters into Q’s chest. “What time is it.”

Q uses the hand that was dangling off the bed to fish around under the pillow, because he can’t actually remember what time he set his alarm for. 

“Oh-eight-hundred,” he says, and Bond groans.

“Breakfast doesn’t finish until ten, we can get at least another hour.”

In any other situation, Q would argue, because time is a horrible thing that never makes sense and moves in drags and leaps as it sees fit. Here, however, with Bond apparently content to continue lying on top of him, sleeping on top of him, Q decides that today he’ll be selfish and deal with the time-related consequences later. 

He sets a new alarm for an hour’s time, slides the phone back under the pillow and then, in a fit of daring, lays his arm across Bond’s shoulders.

Bond hums, sinking further into Q, and Q smiles, his eyes already falling closed, safe and comfortable and completely at rest.

**Author's Note:**

> Keep notes:  
> \--so I hate the last line of this but oh well what can you do  
> \--these boys are idiots give them a room with literally forty (40) beds and they still end up sleeping on top of one another  
> \--Bond deserves cuddles


End file.
